History of Ukraine

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major treatment

1917–1991

Bessarabia’s incorporation

...River. Kishinyov (now Chişinău) became Moldavia’s capital. The northern region of Bessarabia (Khotin) and the coastal plain from the Danube to the Dniester were incorporated into Ukraine, or the Ukrainian S.S.R. During World War II, Romanians occupied Bessarabia and temporarily reorganized it as part of Romania. The Soviet Union seized it in 1944, and the territorial...

Brezhnev

...of a “new historical community of people, the Soviet people.” Afterward he made it clear that he would brook no opposition to the policy of eliminating differences between nations. Ukraine in 1972–73 felt the weight of this policy. The principal casualty was Pyotr Shelest, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, who had played a leading role in the renewal...

collectivization

...Russians up as the elder brother for the non-Slavs to emulate. Industrialization developed first and foremost in Russia. Collectivization, though, met with considerable resistance in rural areas. Ukraine in particular suffered harshly at Stalin’s hands because of forced collectivization. He encountered strenuous resistance there, for which he never forgave the Ukrainians. His policies...

...left the peasant with a notional but nonexistent surplus on which to live. As a result, over the winter of 1932–33, a major famine swept the grain-growing areas. Some 4 to 5 million died in Ukraine, and another 2 to 3 million in the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga area. Both the dekulakization terror of 1930–32 and the terror-famine of 1932–33 were particularly deadly in...

Khrushchev

...which had been shattered in the Great Purge. This work was disrupted by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Khrushchev’s first wartime assignment was to evacuate as much of Ukraine’s industry as possible to the east. Thereafter he was attached to the Soviet army with the rank of lieutenant general; his principal task was to stimulate the resistance of the civilian...

Petlyura

Poland

...policy of peace. An Allied proposal for a temporary border between Bolshevik Russia and Poland (called the Curzon Line) was unacceptable to either side. Except for an alliance in April 1920 with the Ukrainian leader Symon Petlyura, whose troops accompanied the Poles as they captured Kiev in May, Poland fought in isolation. An offensive by the Red Army drove the Poles back to the outskirts of...

U.S.S.R.

During this period the non-Russian nationalities of the U.S.S.R. were ridden with a comparatively loose rein. In Ukraine, in particular, the rebirth of the national consciousness that had begun a generation earlier was given great reinforcement in intellectual circles and among the peasantry, through a cultural campaign sponsored by Ukrainian communist leaders such as the Old Bolshevik Mikola...

World War II

...the Soviet Union backed the communist resistance movement and allowed the Polish nationalist underground, the Home Army, to be destroyed by the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising of autumn 1944. In the Ukraine, where the Germans were at first welcomed as liberators, the Nazi treatment of the Slavic peoples as inferior races provoked a national resistance movement that fought not only the Germans...

...Hitler and the OKH about the destination of the next thrusts thence: whereas the OKH proposed Moscow as the main objective, Hitler wanted the major effort to be directed southeastward, through the Ukraine and the Donets Basin into the Caucasus, with a minor swing northwestward against Leningrad (to converge with Leeb’s army group).

...Balts in the occupied portions of the Soviet Union should be indiscriminately subjected to German domination and should be economically exploited without hindrance or compassion. In the event, the Ukraine was the major area subject to economic exploitation and also became the main source of slave labour. When the German armies first entered the Ukraine in July 1941, many Ukrainians had...

1991–

Commonwealth of Independent States

...1991 by Russia and 11 other republics that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) had its origins on Dec. 8, 1991, when the elected leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Belorussia) signed an agreement forming a new association to replace the crumbling Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). The three Slavic republics were subsequently...

independence date

...or loyalty that had held the Soviet empire together. Estonia and Latvia joined Lithuania by declaring independence, and this time the United States immediately extended recognition. On August 24 Ukraine declared independence, Belorussia (Belarus) the next day, and Moldavia (Moldova) on the 27th. The Russian parliament, in turn, granted Yeltsin sweeping emergency powers to liberalize the...

Strategic Arms Reduction Talks

...without difficulty in the U.S. Senate, but in December 1991 the Soviet Union broke up, leaving in its wake four independent republics with strategic nuclear weapons—Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia. In May 1992 the Lisbon Protocol was signed, which allowed for all four to become parties to START I and for Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan either to destroy their strategic...

United States

...in the Middle East continued to make that region an important focus of Obama’s foreign policy in 2014. However, the president’s attention dramatically shifted early in the year to a developing crisis in Ukraine. After widespread protests led to the impeachment and then the end of the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych (who called his dismissal a coup d’état), elements within the...

before 1917

...millennium
bce, but little is known about their ethnic identity, institutions, and activities. In ancient times, Greek and Iranian settlements appeared in the southernmost portions of what is now Ukraine. Trading empires of that era seem to have known and exploited the northern forests—particularly the vast triangular-shaped region west of the Urals between the Kama and Volga...

While the non-Russian peoples had made considerable political and cultural gains in 1905–06, these were largely reversed after 1907. Ukrainian nationalism gained ground despite the efforts to suppress it and spread from its nucleus among the professional strata to embrace a growing number of both peasants and workers. In Poland, Russian was restored (after a brief interval in...

Baptists

...Soviet Union) in 1944 by uniting the Union of Evangelical Christians and the Russian Baptist Union. The Baptists in Russia grew from religious revival movements that began in the 1860s and ’70s. In Ukraine, groups of Russians influenced by German Mennonite settlers gathered for Bible study and eventually adopted Baptist beliefs. In Georgia, German Baptists gained converts and developed a...

education

Things began to change in the 17th century. It is necessary to bear in mind that Kiev and much of western Ukraine had for centuries been under the control of the Roman Catholic Polish-Lithuanian state, where intellectual achievement and ferment—especially during the Renaissance and Reformation—had been considerably greater than in Muscovite Russia. The people of Ukraine were...

Ermanaric

king of the Ostrogoths, the ruler of a vast empire in Ukraine. Although the exact limits of his territory are obscure, it evidently stretched south of the Pripet Marshes between the Don and Dniester rivers.

Grand Duchy of Lithuania

state, incorporating Lithuania proper, Belorussia, and the western Ukraine, which became one of the most influential powers in eastern Europe (14th–16th century). Pressed by the crusading Teutonic and Livonian Knights, the Lithuanian tribes united under Mindaugas (d. 1263) and formed a strong, cohesive grand duchy during the reign of Gediminas (reigned 1316–41), who extended their...

Pereyaslav Agreement

(Jan. 18 [Jan. 8, Old Style], 1654), act undertaken by the
rada (council) of the Cossack army in Ukraine to submit Ukraine to Russian rule, and the acceptance of this act by emissaries of the Russian tsar Alexis; the agreement precipitated a war between Poland and Russia (1654–67).

Poland

...The anti-Turkish crusade he planned, however, in which Cossacks were to play a major role, contributed to the upheaval that shook the Commonwealth between 1648 and 1660—the uprising in Ukraine and war in the northeast.

Russo-Turkish War of 1736

Disputes arising from ill-defined frontiers between Russian-ruled Ukraine and the Ottoman-dominated Crimean Tatars provided the pretext in 1735 for a new Russian attempt to establish itself on the northern Black Sea. Austria entered the war as Russia’s ally in 1737. Because of military failures, however, Austria made a separate peace in September 1739, ceding northern Serbia (with Belgrade) and...

Scythian burial sites

...lived in the region around the Black Sea and then gradually moved westward to Romania, Hungary, and Germany. Excavation of their burial sites in the Dnieper valley and near Simferopol, both in Ukraine, and in the Balkans has yielded both actual garments and a wealth of relief sculpture, vases, and plaques that illustrate Scythian dress.

serfdom’s imposition

...herself to an unavoidable evil without much difficulty, Catherine turned her attention to organizing and strengthening a system that she herself had condemned as inhuman. She imposed serfdom on the Ukrainians who had until then been free. By distributing the so-called crown lands to her favourites and ministers, she worsened the lot of the peasants, who had enjoyed a certain autonomy. At the...

settlement by Steppe peoples

The first sign that steppe nomads had learned to fight well from horseback was a great raid into Asia Minor launched from the Ukraine about 690
bc by a people whom the Greeks called Cimmerians. Some, though perhaps not all, of the raiders were mounted. Not long thereafter, tribes speaking an Iranian language, whom the Greeks called Scythians, conquered the Cimmerians and in turn became lords...

...of caravans from the interior. Further indirect evidence of demographic disaster on the steppe in the 14th and 15th centuries is the almost total lack of habitation found on the rich pastures of the Ukraine when settlers from the Russian forestlands began to move southward in the early 16th century. A remnant of the tribesmen who had once pastured their animals in the Ukraine had withdrawn into...

Sweden

...along the Russian rivers to the Baltic Sea acquired enhanced importance. In the second half of the 9th century, Swedish peasant chieftains secured a firm foothold in what is now western Russia and Ukraine and ruthlessly exploited the Slav population. From their strongholds, which included the river towns of Novgorod and Kiev, they controlled the trade routes along the Dnieper to the Black Sea...

Truce of Andrusovo

(Jan. 30 [Feb. 9, New Style], 1667), long-lasting treaty that ended the Thirteen Years’ War (1654–67) between Russia and Poland for control of Ukraine. In 1654 the Russian government accepted the Pereyaslav Agreement, a proposal to annex Ukraine made by the hetman (military leader) of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who had led a revolt in Ukraine against Polish rule...

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